I just started reading betreyal sunday morning & just finished bloodlines today. Wow this series is so good. I can't put it down. Can't wait to read tempest & exile. I Just wanted to add when Jacen realized he had to kill Tenel Ka & His daughter to become sith he proved that all his talk of 'making a better future' & 'stopping a war' is a total lie...he just wants an excuse to kill people & get away with it. Is it possible he's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from being a front-line combat solder at 16 & being tortured for an entire year? It would explain his dark-side behaviour he's been displaying since the dark nest trilogy.

So, with school going on, where you don't find time to read as much as you'd like to

dont you just hate that? i do. lol

One of my favourite parts of the book were the narratives written from Ben's perspective. Though it may have been iterated a little too much that he didn't understand adults (in blunt terms, that is), his coming to terms with the galaxy around him was written very well. This is the best characterization of Ben we've seen since he was born. (cont'd)

i agree completely. and you should like Tempest, i think its the best one yet of LotF).

What I also found odd about the book was the lack of a climax. No large battle, or anything --- but this isn't a criticism. I felt that this actually worked.

I don't know how I feel about Jacen being an advocate of "motive being the difference between light and dark" philosophy --- I agree with it, and wished that Luke hadn't abandoned it so quickly for the entire Jedi Order in Dark Nest. Interestingly enough, it was Vergere who introduced the theory, and if Luke using it for the Order was what helped push Jacen to the dark side, then perhaps Vergere is a Sith, and that was part of her plan the whole time. But I'd rather be seeing Luke give it another try than it being part of Jacen's sith philosophy.

How about Han mentioning Boba a few times before he showed up, and Ben always thinking about Mandalorian boys? That may have been a little much.

it's kind of like "OK, we get it."

A unique feature of Bloodlines was that the narratives were very short. We were never with one character for more than a few pages, and though it was unique enough for me to take notice, it definitely wasn't a drawback, like it was in the Force Heretic trilogy, where the battle of Esfandia, due to being revisited for one page at a time for 300 pages, was the most long, drawn-out battle in EU history. It was a bit disorienting to see Jacen on Coruscant at the beginning of a chapter, and then at the Corellian blockade later in the chapter, but it didn't take away from the enjoyment of the book.

I also applaud Karen for killing Thrackan! I definitely didn't see that one coming. When he survived Jacen at Centerpoint, I thought that he was going to weasel his way to the end of the series.

(cont'd)

That wasn't the only contradiction of previous works with Fett, either --- remember the scene in The Unifying Force where Han and Leia see Fett without his helmet, and Han swears he recognizes the man, but he can't remember where from? Well, it's said in Bloodlines that Fett ventures into public without his helmet for the first time in his adult life. OK, so maybe he didn't consider Caluula Station to be "public". But then it's stated that Han has never seen Fett without his helmet on.

I don't want to be quick to jump to conclusions here, but I have seen a multitude of posters on theforce.net state that Karen doesn't read previous works. So I'm wondering... did she read the scenes with Boba in +The Unifying Force+? Did she do as much research on Boba's backstory as she should have? There were a lot of references to his past, so you know that she did some research, but they were all pretty much from the prequel era.

(cont'd)

His interactions with Barit Saiy were enjoyable to read. But what happened to Barit Saiy? It kind of seemed like his storyline was abandoned. Captain Shevu noted that he had disappeared, and was worried that he had disappeared, and then there was no more mention of him. I hope that Karen has plans for him in Sacrifice, and that he wasn't merely forgotten. I would love to see more interaction between Barit and Ben in the future.

Boba also had some great characterization. I'm debating with myself whether or not there was too much Boba, though. With the amount that he was in the book, it would be easy to hold that opinion, but there was still quite a bit concerning the GA-Corellian crisis that wasn]t about Boba. I'll settle for there being a just right amount of Boba, but if he shows up that much in Sacrifice, it'll be too much.

(cont'd)

I just read Bloodlines.

Don't throw things at me! I have a perfectly valid reason for waiting so long. See, at the beginning of August, I began reading The Shadow Rising. Book Four of The Wheel of Time, a whopping thousand pager weighing in at 393, 823 words. 270 or so pages in, it was off to school, to do a two-day leadership conference for incoming students to the University, followed by two weeks of all-day training to be a Don in residence (though we're called "Community Advisors" where I'm from), and then our school's Welcome (Frosh) Week, a 23-day adventure of epic proportions. Then school properly starts, and I don't find myself reading The Shadow Rising again until I'm riding the Greyhound Bus home for Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving, early October).

(cont'd)

Actually, yes we can. Vergere's motives were to make Jacen stronger and better prepared to face his destiney in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong. They were to open him up to a greater understanding of the Force so that he could bring the war to an end without one side or the other being completely anihilated. She was a Jedi, not a Sith. She gave him the tools he would need in the only way she could at the time, harsh as those lessons might have been.Her motives were pure, Lumyia's are certainly not. Lumyia has twisted those lessons to serve her own dark purposes to corrupt Jacen.

Vergere never taught to seek what Lumiya is telling Jacen to seek. Lumiya encourages Jacen to "take over the galaxy" because of her alternative motive while Vergere would not agree with this. Vergere, seemed to me, to be more of someone who will watch and act only when she wants to; not to unify the galaxy under her own rule like Palpatine, Lumiya, and Jacen.

Jacen is doing the exact same as anakin, he is just too arrogant to see it.

while this is true Jacen does have a little more concerns than Anakin did. Anakin was all about him and Padme, Jacen is doing this for TK, A, and (in his POV) the galaxy.